Over the past year, I have pulled together a group of my closest artist friends with the goal of crafting their portraits and spending time with my social network IRL. I decided to embark on this project because I wanted to explore how photography, with the twenty-first century rise of social media, has found its way into almost all of our relationships.

For centuries, artists have been speaking and trading in images. With subtle power and a density of information, images have the ability to broaden perspective, as well as complicate and transcend the false binaries and political quagmires of text-based language. Now, in the 21st century, images are traded at the speed of light — faster, even, than words. When you take a picture of your friend and post it to social media, it becomes a part of your friendship — not only a testament, a record, but its own event. Every person with an Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat account has a new, layered responsibility to their social network: to represent them ethically; to share their image only with their consent; and, even, to make them look good. There is also the anxiety of hierarchy — who gets enshrined on your grid, and who becomes a part of your Instagram story? Who do you follow, like, or, simply, ignore? With each post, you make decisions and craft — consciously or unconsciously — your own style of visual communication. Your friends — their look, their feeds, their attitude — form an integral part of this process.

With this project, I crafted repetitive mirror portraits to mimic the social media network's ability to reinforce perceptions of the individual through repeat exposure, and to dramatize the complex dynamics of looking, seeing, recording and reacting that form an essential part of social relationships today.

them, a next-generation community platform, chronicles and celebrates the stories, people and voices that are emerging and inspiring all of us, ranging in topics from pop culture and style to politics and news, all through the lens of today’s LGBTQ community.